If Aristotle’s Politics and Machiavelli’s The Prince have inspired statecraft in western civilizations, the Indian subcontinent has drawn liberally for ideas in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, among others. In post-Independence India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous midnight address to the nation on the eve of Independence set the pace for Indian policy-makers in the task of ending poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity. Subsequent policy pronouncements made governments the principal institutions for launching development initiatives in secular-democratic India driven by five-year plans within the framework of a socialist modeled economic policy. Therefore, development management became deeply embedded in systems of India governance.